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I imagined you lived in town, not in an area where there would be enough woods for deer to give birth.
I was living on the edge of a decent sized forest in New Jersey when the wildlife really started to come back. When I was young, all I heard was the upcoming environmental catastrophe and all I ever saw were chipmunks and squirrels. First, the geese came back. I remember noticing them when I was around 14. Suddenly there seemed to be a lot of them. They came back to the point that they're a nuisance in New Jersey now. They've taken over the lakes at parks. Parents won't take their children there because of the goose droppings and because the birds can be hostile to small children. Rabbits came back. I used to take long hikes in the woods by my parents' house. The forest was fifteen or twenty square miles. Some people refuse to believe that exists in New Jersey, but it does. Between the people who insisted that all of New Jersey was a toxic waste dump and the people who swore that the place was defoliated, it was a little strange to walk through all those trees and wonder where the vats of methyl-ethyl dog doo were hiding. A teacher took us on a hike through Campgaw Reservation. She showed us the foundation of a 19th century house. We passed low rock walls on the trail to the house. She pointed those out and told us they were originally made after the farmers clear cut the area and plowed. Northern New Jersey has an abundance of rocks. They had to put them somewhere and the fences marked the field layouts. The rattlesnakes came back. I could do without those. It was national news when the bears came back, but before that I found foxes, grouse, turkeys, and coyotes, even as environmentalists raised hell over what they called encroachment. But those rock walls were all around the forests where I still walked as an adult. I asked another teacher about them in high school. He asked me where did I think they got their food from in the days before freight trains and interstate highways. They got it from here, the same place everyone else got their food. Somebody grew it, hauled it to market in a cart, and sold it. When industrialization took over, it made more sense to work at one of the factories than to break your back 24/7 to grow enough food to survive and maybe make a few extra dollars. Then it made more sense to sell the land to developers who wanted to build houses for the factory workers. When trains and refrigeration made midwestern food cheaper than locally grown, the rest of the farmers just gave up. They were worried about encroachment. Two hundred years ago, my hometown was all farms. The forests covered them all up like they were never there. People forgot the beauty of fields and orchards teeming with fruit and vegetables, ripe for picking and canning to feed the family over a cold winter. All they could see of that were pretty landscape paintings in nostalgic calendars. When I left New Jersey, I was as likely as not to pull into my driveway and find a bear cub scampering up a tree, its momma looking over to me, patiently asking with here eyes, "Yer not fixin to bother my youngin, are ya?" No ma'am, I'm not. But I will remind you that we wuz here first. |